Art, Fine Art, and the Mile End Mission.

Today I went over to my new best friend who I just met’s house; Trixie from the Mile End Mission. She says she likes to infiltrate spaces and get them to make good on their promises to “community”. I love her. We talked about spaces of different kinds for a while actually, trading opinions on the politics of having your own space to do what you want with/have to pay for, versus entering other people’s spaces and encountering the new relationships and constraints that exist there. We agreed that what Puces POP did at the Armoury was good (more on that in this interview).

Trixie has organized a year long project in association with the Musee des Beaux Arts (Museum of Fine Arts) here in Montreal, a project which takes place half down there in the museum, and half up, further north, at the Mile End Mission. She messaged me about how we might work together, after I found the Mission on myspace via the Lickety-Split page, messaged them to see if and when they take donations of clothing, and we brought over the stuff donated to the Clothing Swap we had at our Indyish Launch. The rest of our brand new best friendship is history/premonition.

She talked about how children and the elderly need to unite and take over to save the world and how her intention is to create a kind of endless, limitless project with kids learning different kinds of brain habits from artists and taking that out into whatever they want to do, not necessarily arts, and also learning about giving back. And she said it all in this really calm, friendly way, midst great interruptions from her kids who came in to show us cool caricatures and to get help finding stuff and to throw caramels.

I said some stuff myself, about how Indyish is a long old dream about creating a space to sustain and support relationships between artists, and about how part of my plan has always been these real life encounters and creative competitions- like the 24hr music video making contest- not out of a desire to emphasize competition but rather to celebrate making stuff and to create situations that ask makers to make great stuff. To irritate great stuff into being. Though I think I said it more eloquently at Trixie’s house.

Her project involves creating workshops, some short and some over longer stretches of time, where kids work with different local artists doing real projects and talking about artistic practice. It’s centered around the idea of neighborhood, specifically the Mile End Neighborhood. If anyone local is interested in offering a workshop, ie wants to make art with committed kids and sometimes also their cool parents, you can get in touch with her through me- or better yet, get in touch with the lady directly through the Mile End Mission myspace. I’m going to be emailing some of the local Indyish artists specifically for brainstorming because I have some ideas that I think will be fun. Trixie says there’s a core group of 15 kids but that bigger and smaller groups could form around specific encounters, which to me suggests awesome possibilities for the kinds of kid genius I’ve kind of been missing being around these days, to tell you the truth. (but I haven’t been missing it that much yet, Mum, relax.)